The Central Government yesterday approved the project for the construction of the container dock in the northern extension of the port of Valencia for an amount of 656.7 million euros (VAT not included). The Executive emphasized that the new terminal, which will be taken over by MSC, will be “innovative, flexible and sustainable”, and that the work is designed “under strict criteria of environmental respect and coupled with the objective of diverting traffic of the containers from the road to the train”.
The news was greatly celebrated by the Port Authority of Valencia. The president, Mar Chao, described it as a “historic moment and reason for celebration and gratitude”. The port will hold an extraordinary board of directors meeting on Friday to approve the tender documents.
Now it’s discount time. This is how the Generalitat Valenciana sees it, which will demand that all procedures for the tender and the start of the works be declared urgent. “We have lost more than a year until final approval has been reached, and from now on, any procedure that is carried out will be requested, both from the central government and from the Port Authority of Valencia, to be carried out with more speed”, pointed out the Minister of Infrastructure and Territory, Salomé Pradas.
The focus on respect for the environment and sustainability in transport highlighted by the Executive was already highlighted by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, when he announced on Thursday that the Council of Ministers would approve the project. The minister said it was an “ecological project, 100% sustainable, self-sufficient and that will provide itself with clean energy”.
Yesterday the Executive added that right now the port is “close to the point of saturation” and argued that the project now approved aims to “respond to the growth of activity and continue to be a reference infrastructure within the global traffic of containers “.
The approval of the expansion puts an end to more than a decade of history about the port. It has been more than ten years since the works on the first phase of the expansion were finished, and yesterday, almost finished in December, the grievance was resolved.
In the middle there was a financial crisis that forced the project to be abandoned, the work was resumed and the left-wing opposition – which governed Valencia until May – managed to put it on hold at the table of the central government
The recent energy crisis also forced to update the prices of a work that has shot up the public cost from the budgeted 542 million to 660 million euros. In fact, the expansion has shown and shows signs of being, as this newspaper already stated, a key issue for the Valencian Community in the legislature that is now starting.
Relevant, first of all, because of the new economic scenario it aims for and which is the origin of its purpose. The Port Authority states that the expansion and the future terminal will allow it to continue offering an “optimal service” to the Valencian economy. The economic sector has been very forceful in defending the importance of the expansion of the “number one port in the Mediterranean”, as pointed out by the president of the Business Confederation of the Valencian Community (CEV), Salvador Navarro, in the economic and business summit in Madrid a few days ago, the last act of pressure on the Executive.
Among the economic arguments, job creation is also key. The study promoted by the Chamber of Valencia, the CEV and the logistics lobby ensured that in 2023, with the virtual terminal already operating, 23,225 jobs and around 5,111 more indirect jobs would be created.
But the big stumbling block in this moment of transition has been the environmental impact statement (DIA) that was approved in 2007.
For Podemos, and especially for Compromís, which does have representation in the Valencian Parliament and the central government through Sumar, the DIA is not valid because “it has an expired environmental impact statement and all the official technical reports in against”, they assure from the formation.
With this argument, and with others, the formation announces that it will present the legal battle with the Ciutat-Port commission, which yesterday, along with other environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, asked to meet with the minister to raise he said that the extension “does not meet any real needs of the territory’s economy” and that the work “requires a disproportionate amount of public expenditure to satisfy private interests”.
